Thinking Through Feeling

God, Emotion and Passibility

Anastasia Philippa Scrutton

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781623560713
• eBook ISBN: 9781441145772
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Contemporary debates on God's emotionality are divided between two extremes. Impassibilists deny God's emotionality on the basis of God's omniscience, omnipotence and incorporeality. Passibilists seem to break with tradition by affirming divine emotionality, often focusing on the idea that God suffers with us. Contemporary philosophy of emotion reflects this divide. Some philosophers argue that emotions are voluntary and intelligent mental events, making them potentially compatible with omniscience and omnipotence. Others claim that emotions are involuntary and basically physiological, rendering them inconsistent with traditional divine attributes. Thinking Through Feeling: God, Emotion and Passibility creates a three-way conversation between the debate in theology, contemporary philosophy of emotion, and pre-modern (particularly Augustinian and Thomist) conceptions of human affective experience. It also provides an exploration of the intelligence and value of the emotions of compassion, anger and jealousy.

CHAPTER 1

HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES ON EMOTION AND IMPASSIBILITY

There are two pitfalls in our religious understanding; the humanization of God and the anesthetization of God.

Abraham Heschel, The Prophets

The aim of the first section of this chapter is to reach some kind of appreciation of why impassibilism seemed attractive and obvious to early Christian theologians, and what precisely they meant when they affirmed it. There are many stories that could be told here, but the one I will focus on is about how ancient understandings of emotion informed the early church’s inferences about divine nature. In focusing upon this particular theme, I hope to prepare the ground for the later discussion of the relation between understandings of emotion and impassibility, which will be informed by some of the views of early Christian theologians. The discussion of human pathos and the goal of human apathēia on the one hand, and divine impassibility on the other, will enable us to recognize and evaluate the assumptions with which the early church was working. In turn, this will allow us to discern alternatives lines of argument, to highlight our own contemporary presuppositions, and to evaluate some of these later in the book.

In the second section of this chapter I will complement this with a more recent narrative: a discussion of whether, how, why and in what ways the impassibilist consensus gave way to passibilist theology and an affirmation of the fullness of the divine emotional life. Thus while the first section of the chapter engages with the seemingly remarkable question of why impassibilism ever seemed appealing to Christian theologians, the second section of the chapter elucidates how and and why this was replaced by passibilist theology in the twentieth century. The contrast between the early church and contemporary philosophy will also throw into relief the ways in which philosophies of human emotion influence beliefs in divine passibility and impassibility.

One way to get to the root of why early theologians affirmed impassibilism, and what they meant by it, is to begin with a discussion of early Christian philosophy of emotion. Such a discussion is complicated – and informed – at the outset by the heterogeneity of early concepts of various different psychological experiences, and by the vast range of terms used to describe them. While our term ‘emotion’ encompasses a vast variety of phenomena,¹ the ancient world opted instead for a diversity of descriptions of human psychological experiences. ‘Emotion’ is in many ways an anachronistic term to use in relation to ancient thought. It is semantically alien since the modern sense of emotion was not used until the mid-nineteenth century, when it was developed in association with the rise of secular psychology, and so was defined in opposition to the religious worldview.² More problematically, it is also conceptually alien since, as Thomas Dixon writes, ‘The category of emotions, conceived as a set of morally disengaged, bodily, non-cognitive and involuntary feelings, is a recent invention.’³ While the term ‘emotion’ derives from the Latin motus (movement), motus and its derivatives were rela- tively minor terms in classical and medieval psychology, and were among a number of terms used to express what we would now term ‘emotions’. Greek terms such as aisthēsis, pathos, thūmos, epithūmia, ormē/ormēma, egersis, and Latin terms such as passiones, motus, motus animae, passiones animae, affectus, adfectus, adfectio, affectiones, libidines, perturbationes, permotio, sensus, concupiscentiae, desiderae, appetitus, commotio, concitatio, turbatio, tumultus, appetentia, cupido, desiderium and libido are among the ancient words now often translated and conceptually incorporated into our term ‘emotion’. This translation generally fails to convey the distinctiveness of the different terms – and the concepts to which they correspond – in earlier thought. This often leads to a misrepresentation of the early church’s view of emotions by modern scholars, who risk inadvertently imposing the concept of ‘emotion’ upon pre-modern texts.

One instance of a Greco-Roman term frequently and misleadingly rendered ‘emotions’ is the Greek term epithūmia, translated into Latin variously as concupiscentia, appetitus and desiderae.⁴ Plato used epithūmia to refer to instincts, appetites and passions, though by the time of the New Testament the term often connotes sinfulness or a longing for what is forbidden.⁵ However, epithūmia was still used in a positive sense too. In Luke’s account of the Last Supper, for example, Christ says: ‘With desire I have desired (epithūmis epithūmēsa) to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.’⁶ One of the defining characteristics of epithūmia is that the term emphasizes the active aspect of emotions. The ‘subject’ of epithūmia is actively desirous, rather than being the recipient of emotional forces from without.⁷ This emphasis upon the active nature of the experience indicates one way in which the modern concept of the emotion does not fully convey the meaning of epithūmia: in modern English we do not have a word that distinguishes an active experience of an emotion from a passive experience of one.

Another instance of an Hellenistic concept being inappropriately used as synonymous with ‘emotion’ is the concept of pathos, generally rendered into Latin by passiones, or, more specifically, passiones animae.⁸ The words pathē and passiones are often translated ‘emotions’ in a broad sense, and, more specifically, ‘suffering’.⁹ However, the literal meaning of pathos is ‘something outside one’s control that befalls one’, thus (in stark contrast to epithūmia¹⁰) carrying a sense of the vulnerability and passivity of the subject of the emotion. While pathē are closely linked to passivity in quite a general sense, they are associated with a feeling experienced by the mind as early as Aristotle: ‘By pathē I mean appetite, anger, fear, confidence, envy, joy, friendly feeling, hatred, longing, emulation, pity, and in general the feelings that are accompanied by pleasure and pain.’¹¹ In this sense of the term, pathē are morally and experientially neutral: the feeling experienced by the mind might be good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant. However, in the New Testament, pathos is used by Paul specifically and solely of depraved passions,¹² so that pathē came to imply something morally negative by the time of the early church. From this brief glimpse of a couple of Greek terms, we can begin to see that the term ‘emotion’ does not do justice to the distinctions between the many concepts prevalent in the ancient world and, in particular, in the early church.

Correspondingly, the Greek apathēia and Latin impassibilitas are not conveyed by the English translation ‘apathy’, suggesting indifference, or even by the English ‘impassibility’, which has come to connote ‘devoid of emotion’. Apathēia and impassibilitas are frequently closer to ‘invulnerability’, or ‘incapability of being acted upon by an outside force’.¹³ Because of the Platonic association between pathos and mutability on the one hand, and the New Testament connection between pathos and sinfulness on the other, apathēia and impassibilitas are also sometimes used by the early church to mean faithfulness and moral fidelity.¹⁴ This suggests that the modern understanding of ‘divine impassibility’ is at variance with the definition accorded to it by the early church and its non-Christian contemporaries.

What were the reasons for the consensus on impassibility in the early church? It is well-recognized that one of the primary factors instrumental in the early church’s assertion of divine impassibility is that by and large Christians inherited and adapted a negative view of pathē or passiones (often as distinct from other kinds of [what we would call] emotional phenomena) from the Stoics and Platonists.¹⁵ While it is tempting to suppose that the negative view of the passions was a Hellenistic idea imposed upon a previously emotion-affirming Judaeo-Christian tradition,¹⁶ that does not take account of the fact that a negative portrayal of the passions was present in Christianity right from its birth. Paul of Tarsus was among the first of the writers (Christian and non-Christian) to use pathē in purely negative, and usually sexually negative, terms. In his letter to the Colossians, he advises the community to ‘Put to death whatever belongs to your earthly nature (lit. ‘your members on earth’): Fornication, uncleanness, passion [pathos], bad desire [epithūmian kaken] and the covetousness which is idolatry.¹⁷ Again, in his letter to the Romans, Paul lays the groundwork for Augustine’s belief that sinful sexual passions (in the context of Romans, male and female homosexuality) are a divine punishment for human sin, writing that ‘God gave them [sinners] up to passions of dishonour [pathē atīmias]’.¹⁸ In his letter to the Thessalonians, Paul again displays a negative understanding of passions, and a propensity to understand passions as sinful sexual desires, conjoining the terms pathos and epithūmia to produce the sense of the ‘passions of lust’ apparently rife among non-Christian Gentiles.¹⁹

Paul’s negative view of pathē naturally influenced the early church, and developed in ways that were informed by their own philosophical proclivities. Clement of Alexandria emphasizes the Christian’s duty to struggle against the passions, writing that the true Gnostic ‘is the true athlete, who in the great arena, the beautiful world, is crowned by reason of [i.e. by virtue of] the true victory over all the passions’.²⁰ For Augustine, passio (which he regards as the Latin equivalent of pathē) are movements ‘of the mind contrary to reason’.²¹ They are both irrational and passive (in that the one who experiences them is passive in their experience of them: they are ‘assailed’ by an outside force). The association between passion, passivity and suffering also pervades early thought, and is demonstrated in the etymological relation between the classical Latin term passivus (‘passivity’) and the later Latin term passio, which came to mean both passion and suffering. Dionysius of Alexandria expresses the irrationality and passivity of someone suffering pathos in listing connected attributes when he emphasizes the dissimilarity between God and matter. Those who claim that there are likenesses between God and matter should ‘give the reason why, if both are unoriginate, God is impassible, immutable, immoveable, active in work, but matter on the contrary is subject to passion, changeable, unstable, experiencing modification’.²²

In addition to the association between pathē, passivity and irrationality, passions are also often associated with sin, and susceptibility to passions is seen as a result of the Fall in parts of the early church. We have already noted that in the New Testament Paul uses pathē to refer only to immoral ‘emotions’. This association between passions and sin is made more explicit in Athanasius. Our susceptibility to passions is partly ‘natural’, he claims, because it is the result of our createdness and finitude. However, the extent of our susceptibility to passions is extreme and ‘unnatural’ because we are fallen and sinful. The state of apathēia, which is closely connected with the salvation brought by Christ, not only removes us from sin, but also makes us invulnerable to the susceptibility to passions which results from our finitude and from our fallen nature. Christ’s identification with us in the incarnation (and our responsive identification with him through faith and the sacraments) liberates us from slavery to the passions:

And while He Himself [the Second Person of the Trinity] being impassible in nature, remains as He is, not harmed by these affections, but rather obliterating and destroying them, men, their passions as if changed and abolished in the Impassible, henceforth become themselves also impassible and free from them for ever, as John taught, saying ‘And ye know that He was manifested to take away our sins, and in Him is no sin.’²³

Here, passions have an implicit synonymity with sin. Passions are not only thought to entail passivity and irrationality, but are also consequent upon both our finitude, and our fallen, sinful nature.

Some early Christians adopted the Stoic compositional analysis of emotion by taking on the idea of first movements or prepassions (the visceral reaction preceding passions).²⁴ According to Richard Sorabji, the concept of prepassions (which, for the Stoics, were morally neutral) was developed by early Christians first into the ‘bad thoughts’ inciting sinful passions, and later into the temptations preceding the seven cardinal sins. The link between the first movements or prepassions of an emotion and the temptation to s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Titlepage
• Introduction
• Chapter 1  Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Emotion and Impassibility
• Chapter 2  Passiones and Affectiones in Augustine and Aquinas
• Chapter 3  Emotion, Intelligence and Divine Omniscience
• Chapter 4  Compassion
• Chapter 5  Anger
• Chapter 6  Jealousy
• Chapter 7  Emotion, Will and Divine Omnipotence
• Chapter 8  Emotion, the Body and Divine Incorporeality
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright